Re: [brlcad-devel] BRL-CAD website mock-up

[Christopher S. M. <br...@ma...>]

On Oct 20, 2013, at 7:16 PM, Inderpreet Singh wrote:

> Few months ago I promised to make a newer and better website design
> for BRL-CAD. Since then, I have been working on this new design that
> IMHO would be perfect for the website. I was about to share the
> graphical mock-ups with the community but then later I decided that
> instead of graphical mock-up I will make an in-browser mock-up, so
> that I can show how the certain elements will behave, animate etc.
> which would have never been possible in images. It took me much longer
> than I anticipated but I hope end result is satisfactory

Wow, talk about delivering on a promise...(!)

This.is.awesome.


> *Clicking on BRL-CAD logo will toggle the navigation bar, so that user
> can enjoy more screen estate. Note that navigation links (except
> About) don't work yet. I have not created a mock up for other pages
> yet.

I like it, but I'd suggest something similar to the mozilla/firefox menu where there's some compelling reason to hide the menu and it's visually clear it's a tab that slides up/down.  It could even similarly be hidden by default, so we can emphasize the gray area to showcase recent activity or important information.

> *The whole webpage is divided into slides, to jump to (scroll to) next
> slide, you can click on green hand down icons.

I like the main page becoming a showcase of primary principles/features.  How do you foresee news/announcements/blog updates fitting in with this design?  Would the top gray section become a horizontal flip gallery (like apple.com or most wordpress sites)?  I'd think we need something on the main page.

> *Each slide has an image associated with it, hovering on image may
> animate it. This animation can currently only be seen in chrome
> browser as I have used a CSS3 background image transition property
> which is currently only supported by chrome (webkit) but if approved,
> during deploying I will change that into  jQuery animation which will
> then be supported in all browsers. For the sake of mock up, please
> watch it in chrome.

Works in Safari (on a Mac) too.

> *Design is responsive and is tested on a tablet, mobile and a screen
> of various resolutions (1024 X 728, 1366 X 768, 1920 X 1080)

More.awesome.

> *Login form may look odd to some, actually that space was reserved for
> a huge BRL-CAD logo but I couldn't get the logo with transparent
> background in high resolution. So opted for this alternative. Other
> alternatives can be Recent posts from blog, renderings slide show from
> gallery and so on.

Yeah, we certainly wouldn't want to emphasize login like that.  I think our primary emphasis will be getting started (as a user or as a contributor). I have some customer relationship management ideas that came up during our recent Doc Sprint that will be nice to incorporate.

> *I have grabbed two images of models from grab cad, If that's not
> allowed then we can go for models created in BRL-CAD. (will need
> community's help in that).

We have models and images to showcase, of course.  No worries.

> All the questions, doubts, feedback and suggestions are welcome.

This really is awesome work.  Stylistically pretty darn clean and I even really like how you tied it into the new logo as a pseudo color theme.  So the next step is how to deploy this design.  Did you foresee turning this into a CMS theme?  A Drupal and/or Mediawiki theme?  We can migrate to something else, but we have lots of existing data that will need to be planned for and migrated.  Thank you for your efforts.  Very nice.

Cheers!
Sean